


Breach Births (Twin Skeletons)

by Cymbidia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Compliant, Codependency, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 23:47:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4157562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cymbidia/pseuds/Cymbidia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A timeline of births and resurrections, in two parts.</p><p>You learn: to love, to want, to dig your fingers in tight and never ever ever let go, because one moment's inattention and everything you have could be taken from you, torn form your hands and blown by seaward winds to the edges of the horizon, leaving you clutching at nothing, hands empty. Going, going, gone.</p><p>You are born and you die, many times. Rebirth, resurrection. Every time, it is a breach birth, and you enter the world the wrong way, the painful way, because you must land on your feet and be prepared to hurt and fight the moment you are born, because there are no soft safe places in this world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breach Births (Twin Skeletons)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Escapement](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1597133) by [kvikindi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi). 



> This fic exists thanks to all the sad post CATWS fic I've been reading. It is in particular inspired by Escapement by kvikindi, aka the best most perfect post CATWS fic possibly ever written. I mean, everyone has probably read it, but no one will rave about it possibly being the best thing every written about CATWS. But whatever, this is like 25% inspired by that and 50% inspired by seeing babies get born, which is violent and bloody (though there's no actual graphic descriptions of birth in here lol), and 25% inspired by all the fic about Steve being dark and bitter that I've read this week. Even though this ends on a pretty positive note, all things considered.  
> I've taken a few artistic liberties with the reality of breach births.

 

 

**_ Part One. _ **

You are born screaming, protesting, angry.

You do not know yet what path your life will take, but you resent the breaching of the only safe place in your world, and you howl and wail, ugly and angry, but soft and kitten weak, because you are born without lungs strong enough to fully express your displeasure. This is only the first of your difficulties.

You live.  
You learn to live, to struggle, to take and take from the unyielding grip of life, to fight with fist and teeth until you are nothing but blood and bruises, and you live.  
You learn: anger, bitterness, resentment.  
You learn: your mother's smile when you present her with a scribbled drawing, Bucky's cool hand on your brows anchoring you even as you shiver and shake and burst almost into flames, the vicious satisfaction of a punch that connects with flesh, thudding sickeningly as your opponent finally hurts the way you hurt.  
You learn: to love, to want, to dig your fingers in tight and never ever ever let go, because one moment's inattention and everything you have could be taken from you, torn form your hands and blown by seaward winds to the edges of the horizon, leaving you clutching at nothing, hands empty. Going, going, gone.

You are told you are weak. You are told you are broken. You are told you are not enough.  
You have: rage burning in your gut, blood slick on your knuckles, bruises high on your cheekbones.  
You have nothing, you are nothing, but you fight for it, and you make it something.

Sometimes, you will follow Bucky to a bar or a dance hall, and you will not dance, because you do not know how. You never stay long, because the smell of perfume and alcohol makes your lungs clench up. And you never want to leave, because the dim glow of lights that cast deep shadows on Bucky's face caress him in a way you cannot.  
You are full of rage, but you are impotent with it, and your helpless impotence stains and darkens everything you do. You want to reach out and touch him, even through you have been told it is wrong. You want to brush his hair from his forehead and allow your gaze to turn intimate and adoring, even though you know you oughtn't. You want to rip out your defective but still beating heart and present it to him with both hands, on your knees, begging, begging. You cannot move your finger to breach the interminable gap between you. You cannot bring yourself to let down your prickly guard. Your knees are too proud to bend and your heart is broken and too paltry for a gift or an offering or a sacrifice. You want to give him the whole world on a platter, but you have only yourself. Your poverty is not limited to your worldly wealth. Even the very flesh on your bones and the heart in your ribcage are signifiers of your deprivation, your total lack of anything of value. You are nothing. You have been told this many times, but never do you come as close to believing it as you do when you realise your total poverty of self. You have nothing to offer to Bucky except your life and your eternal soul. You would cast yourself at his feet and beg for the privilege of kissing his hand and offering him yourself to him as a slave in an instant, if you ever thought he'd want it from a nothing kid like you.

(Bucky is ragged and hardened by war in a way you know you soon will be too. He takes his shots of whiskey far too quickly, and he flinches when anyone comes near. Still, he says to you, "That kid from Brooklyn, I'd follow him." When he means, "yes," and "I'd follow you anywhere," and "I'm yours to have and keep and do with as you please," and you are startled, then you think, ' _oh. Oh._ ' and ' _you too, huh?_ ')

Somedays, you wish you could forget your rebirth.  
You are born screaming.  
You mourn the loss of your old self, because it is a defeat.  
You have tried for all your life to be something when people looked at your rattling chest and your crooked spine as if they made you nothing. And you proved them right, and you lost, and you only became something when you were molten down and reforged in a steel womb into a body without any of those old defects, and you think, if all those people who once denied you could see you now, they'd say, you're something, Steve Rogers, and they'd be right but you are also nothing, because they were right and you were the one who proved them right.  
You have no mother to nurture you and birth you now. You are inside a metal coffin, and they light you up and burn the human weakness out of you, and your body swells with the power of it, and out of the coffin of the man you used to be emerges a godling or a monster. You can't tell which.

It does not feel like being reborn. It only feels like dying and dying, and even when you continue on, stronger and taller and perfect, you are still dead. You are living on borrowed time. You are living in a borrowed body. But that is fine. This new person is also borrowing your name, your face, your past. It's a fair enough trade. One life for another.

War is what this new body of yours is made for, and you think, ' _will I become a weapon,_ ' and _'will I make it out alive_ ,' and ' _will I make it back.'_ You don't yet realise it but you have already become a weapon, and you are already dead, and you will never make it back, because you will carry it with you until you die, until the end of your resurrections.  
But before the business of war, there is the business, of war. You prance, a pretty pony, and sing for your dinner. It isn't the worst job you've had, not even the most humiliating, and the burn of impotent frustration is so strange to this new person you have become, as strange as it was once familiar. You dance but not to your own tune, and you lead attacks on painted beaches with fake guns, and you play at make believe, because all your life has become is one long terrible game of make believe. You want to be a real boy, but you gave that up with your rattling lungs and your defective heart and your humanity.

You get to stop playing make believe and play soldiers for a while. Your slip your leash because if there was any trace of humanity left in Steve Rogers, it was Bucky Barnes, and the burn in your chest and the weight in your lungs is so terrible, when you think about existing without him, and it is as if the man you used to be, the real Steve Rogers, is rattling at your ribcage and pleading for you to please save Bucky, because Bucky was the most important thing. The real Steve died to become you, so you could follow Bucky. He is your purpose. He is your mission. He is your everything.  
You have more to offer him nowadays, your strength and your fame and the miraculous span of your shoulders, swelled with chemical strength. But still, all you want to do, the only offer you think will suffice, is to rip out your heart, newer but still the same, still beating only for him, and show it to him and say, look, look, I've kept it safe for you.

There is—  
There is a man.  
Maybe he is not a man any longer, just as you are not a man any longer. His face is red, slick and bloody, because he has ripped away his guise of humanity. You think, this is what I am now, that is my face under my skin, and you swear that you would never become that monster, because your human face is the only thing by which Bucky can recognise you.  
But then, you see the horror and realisation on Bucky's face, and you think, ' _oh. Oh. You too, huh?_ '  
And in the end, you should have known, because never once has the either of you gone anywhere and found that the other didn't follow.

It is like joy, one of the first and primal joys you ever learned, to run and fight and hurt when your body doesn't betray you, just keeps going and going and going, infinite and strong. But it is also war, and war is not something you were ever prepared for, even though it is everything you were made for. You do not get the worst of it. You never feel the fear of being cannon fodder, of being within the margin of acceptable losses. It is much better like this, Bucky tells you. None of your Commandos are ever blasted to ragged pieces of meat while they were next to you, never finishing their last sentence. None of your comrades are ever torn of an arm or a leg and are sent home with envious stares. You did not have to feel the bone grinding tiredness of men who are waiting for their turn to die. Instead, you get adrenaline, and explosions, and the slick gush of blood as you and Bucky slink behind the enemy sentries and pick them off before they can protest. Instead you get to be the one who shoots the products of Hydra's twisted experiments, animal and human, all begging, begging for death. You balked once, but Bucky does it for you, because he has also begged for death, and his plea went unfulfilled. You do it after that, because you know who Bucky really wants to shoot when he squeezes the trigger.  
You are selfish.  
'Thank you for pulling me out from the canon fodder' Bucky's wan smile says. There is the burn of something dark behind his eyes.  
'Sorry for taking away you last chance at an honourable discharge and the rest of your god damned life,' you want to answer. You know you aren't going to make it out alive. Neither of you. Maybe some of the commandos will make it out alive, and you pray for it, but you and Bucky were monsters engineered to fight this war, and by its end you will both be dead.

You are right, of course. When you are sent to capture Zola, the drumbeat of the war pounds a little faster in your head. The end is approaching.  
Still, still. You had thought you would be gone first. You had always thought you would be gone first.  
Bucky is torn from you by the bitter winds ripping through the alpine valleys.  
You want to scream.  
You want to rage, to rail, to protest against cruel reality and crueler fate.  
You are lost, a ship without an anchor, tossed adrift in a storm.  
You reach and reach and then you do not grasp and you are torn from the last safe place you will ever know in your life, and you are left shivering and shaking, at the total mercy of this indifferent universe. You'd forgotten. It was hubris, really. You'd forgotten the first lesson you ever learned, which was to dig your fingers in tight and never ever ever let go, because one moment's inattention and everything you have could be taken from you, torn form your hands and blown by cold mountain winds to the bottom of a snowy ravine, leaving you clutching at nothing, hands empty. Going, going, gone. You have forgotten that everything you have ever had was won with bloodied knuckles and broken bones. You thought that your new miraculous body would exempt you from the indifference of the universe. You thought that once you had been bound to your trajectory of violence and bloodshed and death, nothing would surprise you. You were wrong. Hubris.

You stumble, in the days that follow. You feel like a newborn. Your muscles feel weak, your bones feel frail, and your eyes only see what is in front of you. A report. A battle plan. Blueprints. You cannot see any further than that. You don't need to see any further than that. You are a newborn infant, forced before you are ready to crawl and walk and speak. But you are ready to fight, to hurt. Your gut burns with anger, but it is a banked fire, glowing embers, tired, tired.

When it finally comes, you are ready for it. The Tesseract clatters to the ground with finality, the Red Skull gone. And of the three of you, you are the only one left, and your time is also coming soon.

"I've got to put the plane in the water." You say. And "there is no other way." You say. But what you really want to say to Peggy is, don't you see? This is where I was going to end up from the first moment I stepped into that metal coffin. This is where I am supposed to be. This is _right_.

You lie down on the floor behind the pilot's chair. You are ready. You picture yourself going to sleep, drifting off and being welcomed back into darkness like a mother's womb. You are wrong. The water bites at you, and you gasp, but there is no air, and you struggle, even though you know it's futile, even though you know it would be faster if you were to just accept, and you breathe in a lungful of icy water, and you are dead.

 

Except, except.

You are wrong. You ought to have learned to never _expect_ , because your expectations were made to be broken.  
You think you have been captured, you know you are being deceived. You don't understand, but you burst out of the movie set room they have built for you and tear out the building and find yourself standing in the middle of Times Square, a foreign city, an alien world.  
You want to scream, to rage, but seventy years of silence and cold has taken your voice and doused your fires  
You think distantly, that you oughtn't have been so eager to tear yourself from that gentle deception, shouldn't have been so eager to tear yourself from the last safe, painless place in this world that you will ever know.

You are resurrected, but you do not scream.  
Your voice has failed you.  
You will soon become accustomed to the pain and grief scouring like sandpaper over your every tender organ, and then, you will no longer need your voice, because then you will stop wanting to scream.

You are born and you die, many times. Rebirth, resurrection. Almost every time, it is a breach birth, and you enter the world the wrong way, the painful way, because you must land on your feet and be prepared to hurt and fight the moment you are born, because there are no soft safe places in this world. All you have is the fire burning ever lower in your gut, your bruised knuckles, and the heart, thump thump thump, that you are keeping safe, for someone who will never come to reclaim it.

You live.  
You are the walking dead, but you learn to live  
You learn to live.

(And then one day, one day, you find that you have once again expected wrong, and even though your chest is whole and your ribs are in their places, the heart that you have kept safe and sound all these years has been ripped out of your chest, torn out by its true owner, and you want to scream, and you do not scream, and you do not fight, and you drop your shield, because even if he no longer resembles anything soft and human, Bucky Barnes will always be the last human part of Steve Rogers. His eyes are dead, empty, and you think, horrified, how many breach births has he had to endure, how many resurrections, before he stopped screaming, before they doused out his fire? There are no safe warm places in this world, but for him, there are no more safe warm spaces in his head, either. How many times has he been ripped from his peace and thrown into the cold? Your veins feel like ice. You want to speak, to beg for his forgiveness, to throw up. You drop your shield, and you offer yourself, all you've ever had to offer, as sacrifice, as an offering. And, a more gracious God than the one who governs this universe, Bucky accepts.)

 

* * *

 

** _Part Two._**

 

You are resurrected.

You wake. The ice in your veins is melting. Your skin burns from thee terrible burning heat of the air outside your tomb. You want to wail, and to retreat inside of yourself, where it is cold, and where you are alone.  
The needle slips into your veins, and your heart thumps, and you slip, and something slides out from between your fingers.

You sit in the chair, and you open your mouth for the rubber mouthguard, and you are pliant, distant, until electricity burns through you and pulls you from inside your head and into your skin. All the walls inside of you crumble, and you are nothing more than an exposed nerve, helpless. You are emptier inside now, your head is filled with nothing but the rubble of ancient monuments, collapsed long ago. You do not inhabit that space any longer. Instead, you are stretched across every muscle and every inch of skin, and you burn and burn and all the fight and disobedience is burnt out of you, and you are pliant, and you hurt when you are told, and you hurt, but your hurts do not matter.  
You are a newborn, and you stumble along on steady legs. You will obey, and when you have completed each of your tasks you can be back in your tomb again, where the only thing that hurts and burns is the ice and the cold.

Only, only, you are not put back in your case. You fail, because the ancient ruins inside your head shake and groan as an earthquake sweeps through you, all at the sight of a face, the sound of a voice, the syllables of a name. You fail, so you are put back in the chair, and this last human weakness is burnt out of you.  
You stumble with steady legs out of the chair, and you have forgotten the face, the voice, the name, but there is something stirring in the rubble of your mind. Some long slumbering monster has finally woken to inspect its territory. You want to tremble in fear, but all you are made of is terror, and you do not tremble, and you do not shake, and you are steady, ever steady, as you do what you are told.

You dislike being on the helicarrier. This realisation startles you. You hadn't know you could dislike anything. But the hellicarrier is so high up, and when you look down at the world below you feel like you are falling, and distantly, you remember, you remember—

You hurt the man on the helicarrier. You hurt him because you are told to hurt him, and you hurt, but your hurts don't matter, even when your every nerve is screaming out in pain, your every muscle feels weak at the wrongness of raising a finger to this man, His face makes your gut feel hollow. His voice causes earthquakes in your head. The broken bones and blood and bruises are almost inconsequential when the only thing you have, the crumbled ruins of your self, are shaking and groaning and there is the monster, the ancient slumbering monster, and it is waking from the call of his voice. It rises up, a stone golem formed from all the weathered columns and mossy bricks of the ruins inside of you, and looks upon you, its eyes terrible and fiery, burning you with only its gaze.

Only, only, you realise as the monster rears its head and roars and swallows you whole and freezes you in your place that the monster is you, the monster has always been you.

Your fist clenches but you cannot bear to let it fall. Your chest feels hollow, and your other hand curls agains the man. A heart beats in his chest, shivering against the palm of your hand. You cannot hear or feel your own heart beating, but you are intimately aware of his, the liquid thumps of it causing tremors to run through you, until your ears pound with the drumbeat of his heart. He looks up at you, and you see, you see—

The man—Steve. Steve has dropped his shield. Steve has given up. Steve has surrendered, for the first time in his life. The monumental weight of his defeat grounds you, settles you, and you, the golem, the monster, the simulacrum, the shade —Steve offers himself as sacrifice, as appeasement, and you, the monster, ancient and gracious, you accept his offering, because he is the only offering that will soothe the thing straining at the seams of your skin.

He falls, and you follow. You are distantly aware that this is not the correct order of things. He falls into the quiet of the water, and you follow, and you pull him out, and you watch, until you are certain his lungs have learned to breathe, and then you lumber away, an ancient tired monster, to lick at your wounds.

The thing is, though, you were never trying to hide from Steve. That is not the order of things. Steve Rogers is the last human piece of this monster, this golem, that he calls Bucky. He finds you one day, when you are ready to be found, tugged by the insistent hollowness in your chest to him, homing like a pigeon, coming to heel like a good dog.

Steve cries and cries, sometimes, when he looks at you, or when you say something that shocks him, but his touch on your skin is cold, soothing. He has felt the touch of ice before, and even though the ice is all that keeps you from burning into embers, you are angry, angry that it has sunken its claws into him too.

You often wonder what it is that Steve wants from you. He made a bargain. He sacrificed himself, but what is it that he wants in exchange? You are an ancient demon, but you are not well versed in the way of bargains. You have so little to give. The only thing anyone has ever wanted from you was for you to hurt.

You sleep in his bed, at night. It soothes him, and it soothes you too, sometimes. Steve always apologises for holding you too tight, when he wakes up and finds that the two of you have tangled into one mass of limbs, two separate universes trying desperately to converge into one, but you see the desperation in his eyes, and you feel the desperation in his touch, and you know that he is not sorry. You know that the thing wants the most in this would is to burrow his way into your chest, to hold you close and crush your bodies together until your skeletons have melded into one, and the one heart between the two of you pumps for you both. You would finally return to the two faced monsters of Greek myth, complete at last, the two faces of Janus, no longer half blind in your separation.

You fuck him, some nights, and he makes shocked, hurt noises. You are violent and forceful and ungiving in your movements. You don't care about orgasm or pleasure. All you want to do is to be inside of him, to burrow in so deep under his skin you can never leave, so deep you could never be taken from him, nestled in the gentle cage of his ribs, between the lobes of his powerful lungs. You would hold him together, and he would march to your beat, bathump, bathump. Steve cries when you fuck him, mostly, and at first you thought you were hurting him, but when you pull away, fearful, he whimpers and begs you like a dying man, "don't stop, don't stop."

There are no warm, safe places in this world. The only place that can shelter you is within each other. You would open your ribcage for him to climb into, but you are nothing, nowadays, a wisp of a man, a shade, a ghost, and you cannot contain him, cannot protect him, so you burrow inside of him instead, and nestle yourself there, inside of his heart, and you let the tides of his blood wash over you, warm, gentle.

It hurts you to remember. Your past has been burnt from you, and the wounds have all since scarred. Each memory that returns forces the scars to reopen, tearing at you deep inside. Each memory that returns is a little resurrection, and you are a little less of the stone golem, a little more of the fleshly monster.

You ask Steve once, why does the world outside of the ice burn like fire. Why does everything you do make the world lash at you with burning tongues of flame? You realise now that you wanted to rail against the pain and the cruel injustice of the heat licking at you, every time you were taken from the embrace of the ice, but it confuses you. They say that the ice is terrible, they say that to put you in your tomb was a mistreatment, but, the world outside burns you, and it is much much worse. Steve had blinked at you when he asked, looking heartbroken. He didn't have an answer for you, but after all this time, you finally realise, it was only the pain of living. The fire was only the cost of being alive. It is a cost you are willing to accept. Your world burns and burns and burns, endlessly. "I am alive." You think, testing out the idea. You are getting used to it.

Steve knows what it's like, to be reborn in a breach birth, to burst out of yourself wailing at the loss, to have the person you shed and burst out of bleed out behind you as you crawled, onwards, onwards. Steve holds you close and swallows you down whole and carries you inside of him, where it's safe, the last human piece of both of you, and Steve teaches you to resurrect more than just your memories, to rebuild the crumbled walls in your mind, to layer on armour over your tenderest parts, so that you are no longer a nerve, scraped raw, no longer stretched across every muscle and every inch of skin, hurting and hurting, ceaselessly. You build walls in your mind, around the soft tender parts of yourself, and you make a place for yourself, where it is warm and safe, and you think, one day, when the walls are strong enough, you could carry Steve inside of you there, the way he carries your heart inside of him.

You drag each other along, the two of you, as you are left out in the cold of the world, pulling the other along when you yourselves can barely crawl. You lean against each other, hardly able to carry your own weights, hardly able to live in just your own bodies. You stumble along together, and you relearn all the important things. To love, to want, and to fight for it, until your knuckles bruise and your fists are bloody, because that is the only way anyone can hold onto anything important, by fighting for it.

You are born, and you are resurrected, and you live. That is enough.

That is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> Attack of the second person strikes again! I owe this fic to many influences, but most of all to Eacapement by Kvikindi, which is the best post CATWS Buckycentric fic you will EVER read. EVER. It's what every second person fic wishes it was. I read it to get into the post CATWS bucky headspace. I read it when I have nothing else to read. I read it when I'm sad. I've read it at least twenty times in the last year. I was inspired by one part in particular in Escapement, where Bucky doesn't know what people want from him and Kvikindi describes his perceived lack of anything to offer as a poverty of self and I liked that phrase a lot.  
> The rest it just sort of came, mostly because I'm fascinated by how violent a process being born actually is. I've seen a few births, and they are all bloody and violent and terrifying. Poor Steve keeps thinking he's gonna be fine or he's gonna be dead, but all it gets him is another rude awakening. Poor baby. And Bucky. Well, you know. Poor Bucky.  
> I debated whether to tag this is as codependence because I think the tone of this fic is pretty violent without actually even featuring any violence really, so I figured the expressions of affection weren't that extreme. Probably. It's all figurative. But then I looked at it again and decided maybe I'll tag it just in case. There's nothing cute or romantic about this fic, anyhow:(
> 
> I wrote this fic because I've been in a kind of dark headspace lately and that's the kind of headspace when second person narration just makes so much more sense. This fic ended up with a more brutal kind of tone that I was aiming for. All I wanted was second person sads. But that's just life, I guess.
> 
>  
> 
> Find me at sadtrashbuckybarnes on tumblr.


End file.
